Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir traces the grief process through the lives of contemporary women writers to show how its complex, multi-layered nature can encourage us towards new understandings of loss.

An award-winning study of England's unique and peculiarly insular variant of modernism. While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-award-winning book, Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that 'the modern' need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus emigre, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjeman's nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

A collection of the work of Uwe Johnson. It includes "Speculations about Jakob," a Faulknerian novel; selections from "Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl"; Anniversaries II: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl"; and the writer's essay on the Anniversaries."

Teaching Modernist Anglophone Literature features fresh classroom approaches to teaching modernism, with an emphasis on pedagogy grounded in educational theory and contemporary digital media tools. It offers techniques for improving students' close reading, critical thinking/writing, and engagement with issues of gender, race, class, and social justice. Discussions are raised of subjectivity, perception, the nature of language, and the function of art. Innovative project ideas, assignments, and examples of student work are offered in a special annex. This volume fills a gap in higher education pedagogy uniquely suited to the experimental nature of modernism. Madden and McKenzie's inspiring volume can steer the teaching of modernist literature in creative, new directions that benefit both teachers and students. Contributors are: Susan Hays Bussey, William A. Johnsen, Benjamin Johnson, Mary C. Madden, Laci Mattison, Precious McKenzie, Susan Rowland, and Kelsey Squire.

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? This pioneering study of the essays and fiction of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot examines the relationship between the literary and the philosophical dimension of their work and throws new light on the radical singularity of their writing.

Harold Pinter is universally described as "Britain's leading dramatist." This book evaluates the justification for this appellation. It examines his work in relation to changes taking place in the New British Theatre after the so-called theatrical revolution of 1956, and draws attention to those autobiographical experiences that have been transmuted into his art. Beginning with a look at the nature of British theatre prior to 1956, Peacock then describes Pinter's early life in the East End of London, his career as an actor, and his early writing. The discussion follows Pinter's life and work from The Room in 1957 to his most recent play, Ashes to Ashes in 1996. The author argues that although Pinter has not instigated an aesthetic revolution, he has, more significantly, through his representation of human behavior, provoked a new way of viewing the world.

For many artists and intellectuals in East Germany, daily life had an undeniably surreal aspect, from the numbing repetition of Communist Party jargon to the fear and paranoia engendered by the Stasi. Echoes of Surrealism surveys the ways in which a sense of the surreal infused literature and art across the lifespan of the GDR, focusing on individual authors, visual artists, directors, musicians, and other figures who have employed surrealist techniques in their work. It provides a new framework for understanding East German culture, exploring aesthetic practices that offered an alternative to rigid government policies and questioned and confronted the status quo.

This work explores this crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. Thus the first part challenges such New Critical tenets as "exit author" and the "biographical fallacy" and discusses how the author becomes a formal presence in the text.;The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

Victorian novelist Mary Ward, best known to her contemporaries as Mrs. Humphry Ward, was one of the most successful and complex women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into the powerful but patriarchal dynasty of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, she lived at the center of an intellectual and cultural circle peopled by such eminent figures as Mark Pattison, Thomas Huxley, and Charles Darwin. Her novel Robert Elsmere (1888), the first in a series of bestsellers, earned her both unprecedented sums of money and the critical respect of such writers as Henry James. She helped found Somerville College, Oxford, the University's first institution of higher education of women, and helped create a number of play centers for the children of London's working poor. And as the first woman reporter to enter the trenches in 1916, she wrote articles that were instrumental in bringing America into the war.
In Mrs. Humphry Ward, John Sutherland explores a goldmine of materials never before available to recapture a fascinating life, one in which extraordinary achievements were often overshadowed by private misfortune. Sutherland describes how Ward's parents' marriage was shattered by her father's religious peregrinations (an Anglican, he converted to Roman Catholicism, then returned to the Church of England, then became a Catholic again), how her own remarkable success placed considerable stress on her marriage, and how all her resources (both financial and emotional) went to support a renegade, spendthrift, and disappointing son. And he also sheds light on one of the great paradoxes of this accomplished woman's life--that she led the fight to block woman's suffrage.
Throughout, Sutherland writesmovingly of the private life of a remarkable public figure. A fascinating study of how much a woman could and could not do in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this engaging biography illuminates the intellectual climate of the late 19th century.

Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other. This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

This work provides a wealth of information on obscure and overlooked American playwrights as well as some famous ones; it will be a welcome addition for collections specializing in the theater arts. "Reference Books Bulletin"

This directory and index, the first such volume devoted exclusively to contemporary black American dramatists, will have an important place in theatre collections. It captures and preserves an elusive part of artistic endeavor, giving access to literally thousands of dramatic works that would otherwise be lost to scholars and the public. Organized as an encyclopedia, it provides information on more than 600 noteworthy Black American playwrights whose plays have been written, produced, or published between 1950 and the present. The volume begins with an introductory essay surveying the history of contemporary black American drama. Playwrights, screenwriters, radio and television scriptwriters, and musical theatre collaborators are treated in individual entries that comprise the bulk of the book. The volume also supplies a bibliography of anthologies, books, and periodicals cited; mailing addresses for more than 200 of the playwrights; and title and subject indexes.

Franz Xaver Kroetz -- banana-cutter, hospital orderly, fledgling actor and, more significantly, Germany's most popular contemporary dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This study, which situates Kroetz's aesthetics in a political context, focuses on four plays that mark crisis points in his development of a political aesthetic. The breaks in otherwise very successful aesthetic models occur as Kroetz responds to changing social conditions.All those interested in Kroetz, as well as in broader aesthetic questions, will find that this book makes important breakthroughs.

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning challenges the critical tendency to see Plath's writing in `confessional' terms, and draws attention to its self-reflexivity. The book argues that Plath developed a theatrical conception of the speaking subject. In her closely sustained study, Britzolakis relates the texts both to their historical moment and to contemporary debates about language, gender, and subjectivity.

Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, Derrida and Antiquity analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of Derrida's work it explores the relationship between modern philosophy and Plato, the role ancient concepts of democracy have played in modern political debates, and the place of antiquity in contemporary discussions about Europe, as well as investigating the influence that deconstruction has had on the study of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and early religion. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay by Derrida, 'We Other Greeks'.

This bibliography of selected writings by 184 women authors from German-speaking countries will be a boon to teachers, students, reference librarians, and library selectors interested in women's literature. The bibliographic listings, many of them annotated, are preceded by a brief biography and critical assessment. The annotations offer concise summaries and commentary. . . . Coverage is broad, spanning 11 centuries, and including writers of diaries, polemics, essays, etc., . . . A necessary acquisition for all academic libraries. Choice Researchers in German literature and women's studies will be delighted with this new book by Else Frederiksen and thirty-five other contributors. Journal of English and Germanic Philology The literature by women writers in German-speaking countries is abundant and varied, yet it is almost undocumented in English. This annotated bio-bibliographical guide presents both factual and interpretive information on 185 Austrian, German (German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany after 1945), and Swiss women writers from the tenth century to the present. It is the largest collective research project on German-speaking women writers in English to date and among the most comprehensive in any language, including German. The volume concentrates on those authors who wrote and published primarily prose works, including those poets and dramatists who wrote prose. An important aspect of the volume is its inclusion of the so-called non-traditional genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, letters, travelogues, polemics, and essays--forms of writing that play such an important role in the literature by women and that provide particularly valuable insights into their social context. The selections are necessarily subjective, based on the contributors' critical perspectives and areas of interest, taking into account the development and the results of feminist literary criticism and scholarship in the last fifteen years. All entries are listed in alphabetical order in the main bibliography. The appendixes provide alternative means of access. A chronological list of authors by birthdate allows for a chronological reading of the author entries and should be helpful to readers interested in questions about a female literary continuum. The Classified List of Authors by Country will be useful to those interested primarily in any one of the German-speaking countries. Two title indexes list all titles mentioned in the volume in either German or in English translation. The list of selected secondary literature mentions all bibliographies and reference works used for the compilation of authors. It also includes theoretical and critical studies, works on women in the cultural context, and works on specific literary topics. Each author entry begins with the name of the author by which she is best known. A paragraph follows the author entry providing brief information on the author's life and her cultural and literary context. The paragraphs following the general description contain detailed bibliographical information for all listings. Annotations are provided for selected individual works. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in the writings of women authors from Germany (the two Germanies after 1945), Austria, and Switzerland and it is a necessity for courses in Women's Studies and in German Literature.

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels, short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in a creative process which is necessarily conflictual. The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of their own, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.

Explores and interrogates the many and diverse perspectives of the new frontiers of African literary studies. Publication of the seminal volume African Literature Comes of Age, by C.D. Narasimhaiah (India) and Ernest N. Emenyonu (Nigeria), in 1988 generated the consciousness that African literature had attained maturity by the evolution of diverse concerns among scholars, critics, and researchers over the decades following the publication, in the English language, of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958. Since the publication of the first volume of African Literature Today (ALT) in the 1970s, the writings of Africans across the continent have spread across the globe, constituting refreshing and hitherto unimaginable epistemologies. This 40th volume provides a serious critical response to those changing horizons and reflects African literature's maturity, diversity, scope, spread, and above all, relevance. The topics discussed range from sickle cell disease to the animalization of humans, new feminisms and stereotypes of womanhood, the different shades of black masculinity, and political exploitation in creative works. Reaching across boundaries, recent fictions are seen to suggest a widening of conventional literary genres, and new forms that change the known trajectories of dramatic theatre. The substance, freshness, and vitality that characterize the articles in this volume of African Literature Today bring a welcome perspective to the continent's rich creative life.

Co-founder of the Provincetown Players and one of its leading writers, Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House (1930) and was also successful as an actress, producer, and novelist. Her plays were compared, often favorably, with O'Neill's. After a period of eclipse, Glaspell's concern with woman's desire for selfhood brought her plays to the attention of feminist scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Mary Papke argues in this work for a reassessment of Glaspell as a major American playwright. This sourcebook begins with a bio-critical survey and includes plot summaries for each staged work, complete with production history and critical reception. An annotated bibliography of primary works includes plays, novels, short fiction, nonfiction, nonprint, and archival sources. The secondary bibliography documents reviews and provides extensive annotations for a broad range of materials. Chronologically organized, it constitutes a detailed examiniation of Glaspell criticism.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of "The Chip Woman's Fortune" (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity.

Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle before him, best-selling novelist Robin Cook has turned from the practice of medicine to that of writing popular suspense fiction. Widely recognized as the Master of the Medical Thriller, Cook uses the medium of the popular novel to address a range of social issues: environmental pollution, gender inequality in the workplace, the risks inherent in the common practice of secrecy in science research, and above all, the ramifications of medicine's transition from profession to corporate industry. This study analyzes in turn each of Cook's medical thrillers, from "Coma" to"Contagion."

Following a biographical chapter, the genre chapter examines the ways in which Cook's medical thriller incorporates plotting conventions and strategies borrowed from such popular literary genres as the science fiction novel, the murder mystery, and the gothic romance. Each novel is then examined in a separate chapter with subsections on plot, character, and theme. Stookey also offers an alternative critical approach to the novel, which gives the reader another perspective from which to read and discuss the text. A complete bibliography of Cook's fiction, general criticism and biographical sources, and listings of reviews of each novel complete the work. The only study of one of America's most popular contemporary novelists, read by adults and young adults alike, this is a key purchase for schools and public libraries.

How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today. -- .

Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Dawes, explores the intersections between narrative disruption and continuity in post-9/11 narratives from an interdisciplinary transnational perspective, foregrounding the transatlantic cultural memory of 9/11. Contesting the earlier notion of a cataclysm that has changed 'everything,' and critically reflecting on American exceptionalism, the collection offers an inquiry into what has gone unchanged in terms of pre-9/11, post-9/11, and post-post-9/11 issues and what silences persist. How do literature and performative and visual arts negotiate this precarious balance of a pervasive discourse of change and emerging patterns of political, ideological, and cultural continuity?

Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes fairy-tale texts that collapse multiple distinct fairy tales so they inhabit the same storyworld, transforming the fairy-tale genre into a fictional geography of borderless tales. Williams examines the complex narrative restructuring enabled by this form of mash-up and expands postmodern arguments to suggest that fairy-tale pastiche is a critical mode of retelling that celebrates the fairy-tale genre while it critiques outdated ideological constructs. Part 2 analyzes the metaphoric use of fairy tales as maps, or guides, for lived experience. In these texts, characters use fairy tales both to navigate and to circumvent their own situations, but the tales are ineffectual maps until the characters chart different paths and endings for themselves or reject the tales as maps altogether. Williams focuses on how inventive narrative and visual storytelling techniques enable metafictional commentary on fairy tales in the texts themselves. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space argues that in remaking the fairy-tale genre, these texts do not so much chart unexplored territory as they approach existing fairy-tale space from new directions, remapping the genre as our collective use of fairy tales changes. Students and scholars of fairy-tale and media studies will welcome this fresh approach.

Contents:
General Editor's Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction: What are post-colonial literatures?, Post-colonial literatures and English Studies, Development of post-colonial literatures, Hegemony, Language, Place and displacement, Post-coloniality and theory. 1. Cutting the ground: critical models of post-colonial literatures: National and regional models, Comparisons between two or more regions, The 'Black writing' model, Wider comparative models, Models of hybridity and syncreticity. 2. Re-placing language: textual strategies in post-colonial writing: Abrogation and appropriation, Language and abrogation, A post-colonial linguistic theory: the Creole continuum, The metonymic function of language variance, Strategies of appropriation in post-colonial writing. 3. Re-placing the text: the liberation of post-colonial writing: The imperial moment: control of the means of communication, Colonialism and silence: Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds, Colonialism and 'authenticity': V.S Naipaul's The Mimic Men, Radical Otherness and hybridity: Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, Appropriating marginality: Janet Frame's The Edge of the Alphabet, Appropriating the frame of power: R.K. Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets. 4. Theory at the crossroads: indigenous theory and post-colonial reading: Indian literary theories, African literary theories, The settler colonies, Caribbean theories. 5. Re-placing theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory: Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism, Post-colonial reconstructions: literature, meaning, value, Post-colonialism as a reading strategy, Re-thinking the Post-colonial. Conclusion: More english than English. Reader's guide. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

India has a rich literary assemblage produced by its many different regional traditions, religious faiths, ethnic subcultures and linguistic groups. The published literature of the 20th century is a particularly interesting subject and is the focus of this book, as it represents the provocative conjuncture of the transitions of Indian modernity. This reference book surveys the major regional literatures of contemporary India in the context of the country's diversity and heterogeneity. Chapters are devoted to particular regions, and the arrangement of the work invites comparisons of literary traditions. Chapters provide extensive bibliographies of primary works, thus documenting the creative achievement of numerous contemporary Indian authors. Some chapters cite secondary works as well, and the volume concludes with a list of general works providing further information. An introductory essay overviews theoretical concerns, ideological and aesthetic considerations, developments in various genres, and the history of publishing in regional literatures. The introduction provides a context for approaching the chapters that follow, each of which is devoted to the literature of a particular region. Each chapter begins with a concise introductory section. The body of each chapter is structured according to social and historical events, literary forms, or broad descriptive or analytic trends, depending on the particular subject matter. Each chapter then closes with an extensive bibliography of primary works, thus documenting the rich literary tradition of the region. Some chapters also cite secondary sources as an aid to the reader. The final chapters of the book address special topics, such as sub-cultural literatures, or the interplay between literature and film. A list of additional sources of general information concludes the volume.